Following the recent prequel to His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman has been accused of lingering in his own fantasy universe. Yet this new journey does raise useful questions about literary perception.

The historical presence of black people in sixteenth-century England has been deliberately obscured since the days of empire. Efforts to revise these false accounts have unearthed remarkably integrated black Tudors.

Catalonian and Kurdistani dreams of independence have come close to realisation. Untangling these events involves recognising the political and economic realities accompanying the national mythologies.

With American politicians and journalists seemingly locked in conflict, the mischevious games of a sixteenth-century pamphleteer reveal our damaging tendencies to present ourselves in opposition to others.